Other smartwatches have apps. If I only wanted to see the current time I already my smartphone

Most of them don't really, when it comes to OS choice the smartwatch market is incredibly diverse and so having large third-party app catalogs doesn't really work.

I personally view them more as features rather than apps anyway, as they tend to be fairly basic one-hit-wonders which will be easy to develop for Asteroid (C++/Python/QML, sailfishos like middleware), theres already a couple of sailfish fitness timer apps I was thinking of porting.

Of course the whole purpose of a smartwatch is more than telling the time, i have a normal watch for that and it has a battery life measured in years.

Other smartwatches have apps. If I only wanted to see the current time I already my smartphone

If I only wanted to use apps, I already have my smartphone :P

I already have a Pebble. While it is a little bit of fun to have plenty of apps, in practice, I barely use them. There are indeed a few basics apps but no need for tons, as far as I am concerned. Notifications, alarms and music control is what I mostly use (99.5% of the time). And time of course ;-). Even up-to-date weather or health monitoring which is considered basics for some is not important to me.